I have been competing in the ICFP Contest for the last 5 years or so and will do so again this year. The contest begins in 3 weeks, it starts on July 13 at 12:00 UTC and will continue until July 16 at 12:00 UTC.

For those that don't know, the ICFP Contest (https://icfpcontest2012.wordpress.com/) is a long running competition that poses a single hard, and sometimes mathematically deep, task for the participants to solve in a 3-day time period. The task is a secret which is revealed at the beginning of the contest. The problems are hard to solve, but (usually) easy to understand.

To give some idea of what kinds of problems you might expect, previous years have some awesome tasks like:

1. Designing control systems for a Mars rover2. Designing a flight system for orbiting satellites3. Writing an AI for a complex card game

In the past I have worked either by myself or in a group of people where each used their language of choice. I have found that when you work by yourself it is easy to lose motivation, particularly when you get stuck and you have no one to bounce ideas off of. When you work with others it is easy to stay with it, but when you are each using your own language, a great deal of effort is spent in porting solutions between various languages or in designing flexible interfaces and protocols between the various code pieces. What I would like to do this year is work with a team of people using Common Lisp for the main development.

The idea would be to get together a group of Lisp programmers that will communicate over IRC, Google+ hangouts (group video chat), or even a Mumble VoIP server and share files using Dropbox and/or GitHub. We can even try some more cutting edge collaborative setups such as shared VNC and/or screen sessions, collaborative editing using Rudel with Emacs, or just connecting to a single Lisp image with multiple swank connections if we are able to try it out prior to the contest start. Last year, my team used a setup with some of these elements to facilitate development with a widespread group and it worked pretty well.

If you are interested in spending a fun weekend participating and would like to work with me, using Common Lisp, please let me know. Anybody is invited to join this team, but ICFP is more geared towards people with a moderate to advanced understanding of programing and/or mathematics. People with a remedial understanding of both might not get a lot out of the experience, but don't let me stop you.

Also, I apologize if you have received this message several times through multiple Lisp community channels. We have a small community so I really need to beat the bushes to find interested parties.

The team has tried out the setup a few times and it is great fun if you like programming in Common Lisp. If you would like to join us, please drop me a line here prior to this Friday 12:00 UTC, but sooner is better.

The ICFP Contest starts Friday at 12:00 UTC. Whether success or failure our team will be attempting to live code this contest via Google+ Hangouts (and streamed to youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/smithzvk/). If you are interested in joining in on the coding, discussing the problem, or just watching, please join us. We will start at 13:00 UTC after we parse at least some of the problem description.

This is the first time we have tried something like this. Depending on how many problems there are with the live coding, we may shut it down before the end of the weekend.